>>>
the talk about economic recovery, the new jobs report is giving all of us a lot to worry about. only 54,000 jobs were added to the payroll in may, and at the same time,
unemployment rate
jumped to 9.1%.
steve liesman
is the senior economic reporter, good morning.
>>
good morning.
>>
obviously the numbers do not look good for the economy. but are we hearing analysts use the "r" word again?
>>
a little bit. lester, just before the show started, recession, are they? they are, actually. there's a bit of a concern. what happens is when the
economic growth rate
stalls or starts to come down 1.8%, which is where we are in the first quarter, any shock that comes along to hit the economy, that's when people worry about the recession. not given the current conditions but if something else were to happen, there's been a long list of bad knew.
>>
is the projection that it will take sometime before we see a recovery? we're on a recovery. now we're dipping back down. how long can we expect the bad news to last?
>>
pretty robust to date among the economists right now. but whether or not what we're seeing in the slowdown here is the result of temporary factors or more permanent factors. the temporary factors include the surge in the price of oil. you have the japanese tsunami created all of the disruptions in the global supply chain and you produced something like 400,000 fewer cars in the
united states
because of what's happening in japan. and a bunch of other things, the tornadoes, and everything like that. there's a sense that we have one, two months, maybe three months more of weak data before the economy comes back. on the oh hand, people are saying, look at the high deficits, look at the other things, we have a bigger problem in america.
>>
long-term unemployment. 6.2 million americans have been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer. what's affecting them in the compani companies have the money to hire people or they're not doing it.
>>
profit margins, how much they make per widget they create are outstanding as well. businesses lack the confidence in the future to hire. the trouble you get, the people unemployed for 27 weeks or longer, they start to lose skills. they start to become less and less employable. so the question becomes whether or not we have a huge issue that needs to be dealt with in the government sector, the
private sector
gets the people back to work that have been unemployed so long.
>>
the economy affects politics. we have an election coming up, you know,
2012
. what does this mean for
president obama
?
>>
so i don't think it's a matter of genius to say that
president obama
cannot get re-elected with these kinds of numbers. if these numbers remaybe the way they are, if you have lackluster
job growth
, less than 100,000 over a series of several months, i think america would elect a 12-year-old at that point. we have to see the robust
job growth
that we saw, by the way. and i want to give a little caution here. we had several months of
job growth
, several thousand in a row. this is one month's worth of lackluster growth. i don't think it' time to say, you know what,
game over
when it comes to the
job market
right now. we may have a bounce back to the
end of the summer
. if we do have a bounce back, it will be a fair fight. if not, it will be easy for republicans with these kinds of employment numbers.
>>
steve lieliesman thank you very
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